The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎54v] (113/244)

598
THE NINETEENTH
April
is found through the winter of 1819-20. Partly they may be
right; but the real cause which had evoked this one into such morbid
excess of activity was, I believe, nothing else than the suddenly
accelerated progress at this time of the disease which was consuming
him,—this acceleration bringing with it new physical suffering in the
form of a continual burning unrest, and a consequent conviction now,
rather than a mere suspicion as occasionally heretofore, that he had
not long to live. It is not as if his love for Fanny Brawne was itself
his torture; it is as if, feeling the clutches of death upon him, he
had fastened with a kind of angry wonder on the fact that to all the
other bonds with the living world which had so soon to be snapped
the irony of Fate had added, too cruelly, this of so futile a love-
engagement. Confirmation of this view of the case will be found, I
think, in those of Keats's love-letters to Fanny Brawne—they have
all been recently published, for now-a-days people will publish any
thing—which he had written to her from Shanklin and Winchester
in the immediately preceding months. They do not reveal, as yet
at least, anything of that ' profound passion' which the biographers
have discerned in the relations of Keats to his betrothed; on
the contrary, they strike one as coldish, constrained, and artificially-
gallant ; but they contain phrases which do flash out what I conceive
to have been the thought secretly preying on Keats all the while.
' I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and
the hour of my death : 0 that I could have possession of them both
at the same minute,' he says, in one of them, sent from Shanklin
and the words had been significant even then. Now that he was
again beside her, there is evidence of a rise in the fervour of his
affection to nearer the pitch of delirium; but this also connects
itself, one finds, with the agitation within him of the one central
thought of his approaching death, correspondingly raised in intensity
as that also had been by the suddenly accelerated ravage of his
disease. ' I cannot exist without you ; I am forgetful of everything
but seeing you again; my life seems to stop there; I can see no
further; you have absorbed me,' he says in one letter just after his
return from Winchester; and again, in another, ' I shall be able to
do nothing; I should like to cast the die for Love or Death.' His
thoughts of Fanny Brawne and Death together, we can see, had taken
the form of a preternatural kind of jealousy. What! in a few
months should he be in his grave, a kneaded clod, while there
should be still a living world overhead, with all its bustling myriads,
and she should be amongst them,—the beautiful, the wayward, the
shallow-hearted, as he half knew her to be, but 0 her unsurpassable
witchery!—smiling and laughing in carelessness that had ever
existed, and maddening others as she had maddened ? It is thus
that we are to imagine the musings of the poor invalid with himself
in that breakdown of his health which had befallen him in October,